Saturday, May 25, 2013

The March Against Monsanto has seen millions in 436 cities in 52 countries challenging biotech corporations and protesting against genetically modified foods, which despite bans in some states due to potential health hazards remain legal in many others.

Read RT’s breakdown of the March Against Monsanto here:

23:01 GMT: Marches against the biotechnology giant Monsanto have taken place in 436 cities across 52 countries with an estimated total number of participants standing at over two million, the organizers of the global event said.

“If I had gotten 3,000 people to join me, I would have considered that a success,” founder and organizer Tami Canal said. Instead, she said two million responded to her message.

22:37 GMT: In order to take full control of the global food chain the world’s largest owner of patents on seeds Monsanto is lobbying, bribing, suing small farmers out of business and altering scientific research, geopolitical analyst F. William Engdahl told RT.

22:02 GMT: Hundreds flooded the streets of Florida calling on the US government to stop lobbying for biotechnology giants.

A man taken into custody by the Sacramento Police Department has died, according to the police department.

Video obtained by CBS13 of the arrest on the 8300 block of Folsom Boulevard shows a suspect being restrained by a male officer’s legs, while a female officer strikes him 10 times with a baton.

According a statement from Sacramento Police Department, a man in his early 40s entered the Metro PCS store and made unintelligible statements to a female employee. She called 911 fearing for her safety. The man left the store, but went back in when officers arrived and attempted to barricade himself inside by trying to secure the front door.

Officers say they forced the door open and when they tried to contact the man.

That’s where police say the violent struggle began. Officers then called for backup when one of the officers was physically overpowered.

According to the police press release, pepper spray and multiple baton strikes were used to free an officer that was in the suspect’s grasp. In addition, the release notes bystanders kicking the suspect, a security guard also using a baton on the suspect.

Matt's thoughts:
If what the police say is true, why didn't they simply taze him once and taken him down?

Cars burning in Husby as rioting spread to several cities in Sweden last week. Photograph: Fredrik Sandberg
The pace of the neighbourhood watch suddenly picks up. "Here's the fire we've been waiting for," grins Samiy, an Iraqi in a bulky jacket.

It's half past two in the morning and Samiy, along with dozens of others from local Islamic groups and community organisations, has spent the night patrolling the streets of Husby, the suburb at the centre of riots in Stockholm.

Soon there's an acrid stench of burning plastic, and flickers become visible around the footbridge that the group is now jogging towards. A dumper truck on the road below is burning as a crowd of young men look on. Most claim to be watchmen, but as soon as a fire engine arrives, 10 or more rush to the bridge and begin pelting a firefighter who runs up.

"It's enough. It's enough," cries Jamil Hakim, from a group called Safe Husby. "Two nights was fun. But it's enough. It's not fun any more."

Published on 23 May 2013
On May 22nd with tensions increasing on the Korean peninsula,
Korean People's Army, General Political Secretary,
Choe Ryong Hae, visited China as a special envoy,
carrying a personal letter from Kim Jong-un.
The visit is just before the talks between China and the U.S.
and China and South Korea, which makes it important.
Please see the report:

Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) First Secretary, Kim Jong-un,

suddenly dispatched special envoy, Choe Ryong Hae on
May 22nd, to lead the delegation to Beijing by special plane.
During the visit, China and North Korea will exchange views
on the situation of the Korean peninsula and common concerns.

The Illinois House of Representatives on Friday voted overwhelmingly to allow residents to carry concealed guns, taking the state one step closer to joining all others in allowing some form of carrying guns in public.

Illinois is the only state in the nation to ban most people from carrying a concealed gun outside the home. Lawmakers acted on Friday after a federal appeals court in January struck down the ban, saying it violated the right to bear arms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The court gave the state six months to pass a new law that would be constitutional.

The city of Detroit may be facing a deepening financial crisis but that hasn't stopped four trustees of its public pension funds from spending $22,000 of retirement system funds to attend a conference in Hawaii this week.

The trip 4,500 miles west to a four-star resort on the world-famous Waikiki Beach in Honolulu doesn't sit well with the top officials now running Detroit's finances under an emergency order from the state of Michigan. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr has not ruled out a bankruptcy as the city struggles under a $15 billion debt burden, which is being strained further by its hefty pension obligations.

A suicide bomber blew herself up in car near a police building in Russia's Dagestan region on Saturday, injuring 11 policemen and passers-by, Russian media reported.

Dagestan, an ethnically mixed, mostly Muslim region between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, has become the most violent province in the North Caucasus, where insurgents say they are fighting to carve out an Islamic state out of southern Russia.

The bomb was detonated after police stopped the car to check the driver's documents, some 100 meters from the regional police ministry in the center of Makhachkala, the regional capital.

Two freight trains collided at a rail intersection in southeastern Missouri on Saturday, injuring seven people, igniting a fire and triggering the collapse of an overpass under which they were traveling, a county sheriff's dispatcher said.

Dispatcher Clay Slipis of the Scott County Sheriff's Office said that five people who had been traveling in cars on the overpass were injured as were two train conductors.

"One train T-boned the other one and caused it to derail, and the derailed train hit a pillar which caused the overpass to collapse," Slipis said of the crash, which took place before dawn near the town of Chaffee, about 15 miles southwest of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

The avian virus H7N9 is transmissible between ferrets, a common animal model for studying how flu might behave in humans, according to a paper published yesterday (May 24) in Science. Nevertheless, there have so far been no clear cases of human-to-human transmission since March, when the infection was first found in humans. But the new findings have scientists worried that the virus, which has killed 36 people in China, could become contagious between humans.

“On a scale from 1 to 10—from an avian virus with no potential to infect humans to a fully human-adapted strain—we don’t know exactly where this H7N9 is,” Richard Webby, a coauthor of the paper along with researchers in China and Canada and a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, told NPR. “But I think we can safely say from these data that it might be closer to 10 than the avian viruses we’ve seen infecting humans in the last decade.”

Researchers inoculated four pigs and six ferrets with live virus, and all of them became infected, according to Nature. The pigs didn’t appear to be able to pass the virus on to healthy pigs or healthy ferrets, but when the researchers placed an infected ferret in a cage with healthy ferrets, all the healthy ferrets fell ill. The team also placed sick ferrets in cages 10 centimeters away from three uninfected ferrets. One was unaffected, a second was infected, and the third developed antibodies to H7N9, indicating exposure to the virus and suggesting it could transmit through the air.

Flu: there's good news and bad news. On the one hand, there have been no new human cases of H7N9 bird flu in China since 8 May. But we can't celebrate yet. Virologists report today that H7N9 spreads through the air between ferrets, just like the experimental H5N1 bird flu that caused an outcry in 2012. The outcry came after the virus was shown to be able to mutate to spread easily among us while remaining deadly. It now appears that H7N9 bird flu in China can already do that.

Meanwhile, New Scientist can reveal that China is considering closing live poultry markets permanently in an attempt to stop spread of the virus.

H7N9 flu has caused 131 known cases in humans, 32 of whom died, since it emerged in February this year. Tests continue to show that while the virus is a very rare infection of birds in live poultry markets, it is circulating and evolving. But the infection is so rare that those birds can't be passing the virus to enough other birds to keep it circulating. This means it must also be carried, less rarely, by some other animal – so far unknown.

Parents charged with murder after they allegedly chose prayer over medical care for their sick son have been denied bail by a Philadelphia judge.

Herbert Schaible, 45, and his wife Catherine, 44, were charged with third-degree murder earlier this week after their seven-month-old son Brandon died of bacterial pneumonia in April.

If convicted, the Schaibles face seven to 14 years in prison or more. The couple had previously been convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2009 for failing to prevent another son, two-year-old Kyle, from dying from pneumonia.

While boarding Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on Friday, Obama walked past a saluting Marine corporal and strode up the boarding stairs without returning the salute. The President, the military commander-in-chief, clearly recognized the gaffe but made it worse, coming back down the boarding steps for just a handshake - not a salute. The blunder came in the same week Obama appeared to break military protocol by forcing a Marine (inset) to hold an umbrella for him.

As the awful events unfolded on the streets of Woolwich on Wednesday, the mobile phone secreted inside the black Islamic robes worn by Anjem Choudary — the self-styled Sheik of East London — soon started ringing.

Calling him were producers from the BBC’s Newsnight programme, as well as rolling BBC news shows and Channel 4, all wanting to find out from this so-called ‘expert’ what exactly drove young, British-born men to hack an innocent young soldier to death in the capital with knives and a meat cleaver.

Media-savvy, and far more intelligent than his oafish demeanour suggests, Choudary was given star billing on a discussion panel with Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark, as he insisted he was not a ‘hate preacher’ or Islamic extremist.

Russia has ordered the urgent evacuation of the 16-strong crew of a drifting Arctic research station after the ice floe that hosts the floating laboratory began to disintegrate, officials said Thursday.

Natural Resources and Ecology Minister Sergei Donskoi set a three-day deadline to draft a plan to evacuate the North Pole-40 floating research station.

"The destruction of the ice has put at risk the station's further work and life of its staff," the ministry said in a statement.

The station is currently home to 16 personnel including oceanologists, meteorologists, engineers and a doctor.

A nearly week-long spate of rioting spread outside Stockholm on Friday but authorities said police reinforcements sent to the Swedish capital had reduced the violence there, even though dozens of youths set cars and a recycling station ablaze.

The rioting - set off earlier this month by the police shooting of a 69-year-old man - continued for a sixth night in mainly poor immigrant areas in Stockholm.

In a country with a reputation for openness, tolerance and a model welfare state, the rioting has exposed a fault-line between a well-off majority and a minority - often young people with immigrant backgrounds - who are poorly educated, cannot find work and feel pushed to the edge of society.

Syrian opposition talks aimed at presenting a coherent front at an international peace conference to end the civil war faced the prospect of collapse after President Bashar al-Assad's foes failed to cut an internal deal, opposition sources said on Friday.

The failure of the Syrian National Coalition to alter its Islamist-dominated membership as demanded by its international backers and replace a leadership undermined by power struggles is playing into the hands of Assad, whose forces are attacking a key town as his ally Russia said he would send representatives to the conference, coalition insiders said.

After two days of meetings in Istanbul, senior coalition players were in discussions late into the night after veteran liberal opposition figure Michel Kilo rejected a deal by Syrian businessman Mustafa al-Sabbagh, who is the coalition's secretary-general, to admit some members of Kilo's bloc to the coalition, the sources said.

French magistrates decided on Friday not to place IMF chief Christine Lagarde under formal investigation over her role in a 285-million-euro ($368.5 million) arbitration payment made to a supporter of former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Lagarde instead was given the status of a "supervised witness" after two full days of questioning on her 2008 decision as Sarkozy's finance minister to use arbitration to settle a legal battle between the state and businessman Bernard Tapie.

Saddled with Middle East problems ranging from Iran to Syria and beyond, President Barack Obama now faces one that is both old and new: Iraq.

Unresolved sectarian tensions, inflamed by the raging civil war in neighboring Syria, have combined to send violence in Iraq to its highest level since Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops in December 2011, U.S. officials and Middle East analysts say.

A Sunni Muslim insurgency against the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government has also been reawakened. The insurgents' defeat had been a major outcome of then-President George W. Bush's troop "surge" in 2007.

Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers in his crackdown on illegal immigration, a federal judge found on Friday, and ordered him to stop using race as a factor in law enforcement decisions.

The ruling against the Maricopa County sheriff came in response to a class-action lawsuit brought by Hispanic drivers that tested whether police can target illegal immigrants without racially profiling U.S. citizens and legal residents of Hispanic origin.

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow ruled that the sheriff's policies violated the drivers' constitutional rights and ordered Arpaio's office to cease using race or ancestry as a grounds to stop, detain or hold occupants of vehicles - some of them in crime sweeps dubbed "saturation patrols."

Police and fire crews were called to a house near Ray and Higley Thursday evening after a woman found a suspicious package in her mailbox.
Authorities said the package was covered in an oily substance, which wound up making the woman sick.

"It could be coincidence. It could be that the oil itself could have been really anything, a cellphone battery oil. It could have been some type of chemical that would make her sick but nothing of any danger to society or herself," Brian Ruffentine Gilbert Fire Dept.

The woman was transported to a local hospital for precautionary reasons. Two officers were also taken to the hospital for precautionary reasons.

NORWAY - The Norwegian Veterinary Institute has identified four cases of MRSA (Staphylococcus aureus that are resistant to antibiotics) in Norwegian pigs. The country's food safety authority, the National Veterinary Institute and the swine industry are now considering measures to prevent spread of the disease.

"While this poses no immediate health risk, the finding is something we take seriously," said Orhan Åmdal from the FSA.

In 2012, FSA carried out a mapping programme on the incidence of MRSA in pig herds. In the anonymous survey was the animal-associated variant, MRSA ST398, demonstrated in samples from one of the 175 herds.

Spanish officials say the pilot of a small plane carrying three passengers is the only person to survive a crash on the island of Mallorca.

The Cessna 172 single-engine plane took off from the island's Son Bonet de Marratxi airfield just after 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) Friday, failed to gain altitude and crashed into a nearby field, a regional Interior Ministry spokesman said.

Two men and a woman, all Spanish nationals, died in the accident and the pilot was rescued from the flaming wreckage, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.

THERE have been a number of cases of botulism diagnosed in cattle in the North Coast in recent months.

Botulism is a deadly disease that affects the nerves that control movement. The good news is that a vaccine is available (separate from a 5-in-1 or 7-in-1 vaccine).

Talk to your local LHPA veterinarian to find out if your herd is at risk and if you should be vaccinating.

The toxin that causes botulism is produced by a bacteria found in dead and decaying plant and animal matter. Animals fed silage or that chew bones as a result of phosphorous-deficient soils are at increased risk. Dead animals should be buried or removed from areas where cattle graze.

Affected cattle often drool and walk with a stiff gait before going down and dying because the muscles for breathing become paralysed.

An earthquake in far northeastern California did not injure anyone but did cause moderate damage, including to a water tank that supplies hundreds of homes with drinking water, local authorities said Friday.

Plumas County Sheriff Greg Hagwood said the magnitude-5.7 quake sent items tumbling from grocery store shelves and downed chimneys when it hit at 8:47 p.m. local time Thursday.

The U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Center said the temblor was centered near Greenville, about 25 miles southwest of Susanville, and was felt as far away as San Francisco and in two other states. It was followed by multiple aftershocks, including a magnitude 4.9 quake that struck early Friday morning.

About 300 people were affected by the damaged water system, Hagwood said.

Dozens of major Government projects including the High Speed 2 rail line, Universal Credit welfare reform and the rollout of high-speed broadband are at serious risk of failure, Whitehall documents reveal.

There are 23 schemes which have had amber/red warning flags raised against them in the report, meaning successful delivery of the project is in doubt and urgent action needs to be taken to tackle problems in various areas.

A further eight, including the construction of two new aircraft carriers, were given a straight red rating - assessed as appearing to be unachievable as a result of schedule, budget or delivery problems.